The drama, scandals and controversies just keep piling up for President Obama. Hot on the heels of the VA fiasco comes the Bergdahl prisoner swap. Meanwhile, Benghazi just won’t go away, the IRS targeting scandal is growing heads like a hydra, and the EPA’s new regulations are raising all sorts of hackles. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is doing her best Baghdad Bob/Comical Ali imitation, blithely ignoring how she got called out after the initial Benghazi attack. ObamaCare’s giant broken promise remains broken – you still can’t keep your insurance or your doctor. And now, it seems that the southern border has been abandoned and people are streaming across it in droves. Scandals are swarming around Attorney General Eric Holder like persistent flies, almost too numerous to count.
Government seems to have run amok, profligate in its spending and wasting of taxpayer dollars, unaccountable to anyone (even the president, who has claimed that he learned about this or that scandal from the press), and actively working to stifle dissent and squash criticism. Administrators and bureaucrats are writing whatever laws they want. They, along with the President who declared that he has a pen and a phone and an Attorney General who’s enforcing laws however he chooses to, have marginalized Congress and are daring the Supreme Court to stop them.
The list of controversies has grown so long, we barely know which way to turn and which ones deserve our attention. The nation is reaching a point of scandal overload, and even one as outrageous and universally enraging as the VA scandal only seems to hold national attention for a short while.
Or, at least it seems that way.
Even as those of us who pay a lot of attention to politics, whose preferred leisure activity is news watching and political debate, grow weary of the perpetual list of outrages and the perpetual “free passes,” rationalizations, justifications and rank partisan apologia that many in the press and many of those who’ve long supported Obama provide, it seems that the “average Joe” on the street is starting to turn on him. People I encounter in my daily life, people who pay little attention to politics and government, are wondering what’s going on. More and more, as a particular scandal from the growing spectrum touches individuals’ hot buttons, regular folks are jumping off the Obama ship. Rather than simply go about their routines, presuming that the guy in charge is taking care of things, I see growing levels of outrage and bewilderment at how universally messed up things seem to be.
The nation may very well be turning on the shiny promises, the “hope and change,” the “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” This heartens me far more than any pundit’s takedown of a particular misstep, gaffe, lie or failure. It gives me far more hope than reading and seeing fresh outrage from those who are already politically engaged, because the latter is a far smaller subset of the populace and is already stumping hard for changing the nation’s direction. Quality of criticism from a small subset of the populace is no substitute for quantity of disappointment, and it will be quantity that turns election results.
Of course, this growing discontent will face the same demon that always lurks at election time – the promise of giveaways and those who prioritize it over everything else. Moreover, my assessment is anecdotal, so I’m not yet counting my chickens. But even as the engaged grow weary of perpetual scandals, failures and disastrous policies, the wall of disinterest of the disengaged is under siege, and it seems to be fracturing. Beat against something long enough, and no matter how thick it is, it’ll eventually crack. I’ve long and often been tempted to despair for the future of the nation, but the sheer volume of bad news out of Washington is actually warming me up now. Maybe, just maybe, the voters will finally “kick the bums out.”
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